


best before, worst after

by tco



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Coda, Episode: s14e18 Absence, Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Unrequited Castiel/Dean Winchester, season 14
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 09:15:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18465964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tco/pseuds/tco
Summary: It's surprising how much clarity can drowning give at some point when it's been years of rinse, dry and repeat. Even the most beautiful colors wash out in the end.





	best before, worst after

This was the longest burning pyre in his life. This time Dean burned alongside it, to the last spark of fire, to the last breath of empty ashes, to the point where his insides turned into cinders and everything around him went dark; into the night Dean knew would last so, so long. Kansas nights can sometimes get quite cold, especially when you’re wearing nothing but your aching soul and a just as worn denim jacket, but this night is different. It’s arctic cold and it’s Dean who makes it that way.

Sam sat by his side, for endless swollen hours, stiff and quiet like a stone. Grieving the loss, processing the end of what they thought they had - their family. But eventually he went back inside. He’s always been better at it, Dean figures, faster to make peace and keep it. Dean was never this quick to let go, to live again. Every life he’d lost stayed as a new rock to his neck and the deep, dark water always remained close, still in his field of vision even on the best of days. It’s like he has been made for the sole purpose of always be drowning.

Right now, it’s overwhelming, seeping through his boots, growing onto his ankles, knees, it eats him up to the waist and freezes his hands. He can’t move a muscle or blink. It’s just him, black water melted into the horizon and the dead island of his mother’s stake.

And Cas. A rock-tossing distance away, but still too, too close; too present. A sad statue apparently immune to all of Dean’s antarctica, all of the walls of ice. He hovers and haunts, waiting for the right moment to dare and come close.

He can fucking wait ‘til Hell freezes over for all Dean cares.

But the goddamn thing about Cas and Hell is that when he sees it and Dean on the other end, he fucking bulldozes through it, no matter the weather, no matter if Dean wants him there or not. And since Sam is back ho-- back in the bunker -- he won’t perform a second small miracle of a selfless, humane gesture of protecting Dean for once. He won’t stop Cas on his path and wordlessly tell him this isn’t the time.

Hours have passed, they’re all alone, Cas pushes through dead ocean like a knife, in small considerate steps, and he believes, as always, that empathy, pain and anger all have an expiration date. A short one at that. 

He walks up to Dean, face dressed in its woundest, pain so clear Dean sees it through the dark. This time his presence warms and soothes nothing. Dean wants to scream, throw punches or just shake him hard into going away, but he can’t. By now the water has swallowed him whole and he keeps going down like a rock. Cas and whatever he wants to do or say is too far away to reach Dean now, maybe ever.

He’s so, so tired of raising snakes on his lap over and over when all he wanted to do was to raise a family. Mary, John - they said he turned out well and, fuck, he believed in that - in himself - too, perhaps more than they ever did. But that was wishful thinking. He failed spectacularly, what with all those family snakes, including one totally ballistic on the loose and one that always knows better, then cries.

Can’t nurse angels into people, Dean reminds himself yet another time. The apple never falls far enough from the tree, never. The reminder sticks until he gets drunk with love on some small miracle and it doesn’t anymore (until next time).

But now his mother is dead, gone burning for the third time and it makes the charm, breaks the charm -- and he believes, for once in the possibility of the painful lovegiveness loop being over.

He meant something to Mary - not as much as he hoped to, not as much as he always needed. But she saw him, at least saw him and came back to him, despite the wounds of lost pasts and broken holy icons they made of each other. And they were willing to walk on shards arm in arm; and if sometimes his mother would sleep on his, so trusting, so serene, so there, it had to be enough. Even if the fond words were never present. He meant something, that he knows. But she - she meant the world to Dean.

Now his mother is scattered on the ground, and he can’t tell her apart from dead wood and dirt.

At the bottom of the sea, he searches his heart for the tingling warmth Cas’s presence raised in him in sharpest despairs, in deadest of his days. For the bare, raw minimum of hope that rekindles that heat again and again, from almost scratch, each time his heart breaks. Weary, weary acceptance is all he finds. It’s not there. Ain’t that much of a surprise; the nothing was long in the making.

Cas got one thing right: the expiration date for everything.  


End file.
